The Fedora Project has pushed out its 9th release. The release announcement is one of those fancy story ones, without much actual information, but an earlier email by Fedora project leader Paul Frields had some more interesting things to say.

Fedora, as far as I know, made no public statement about this fact that nvidia video cards/chips will not work. They announce the OS as finished and ready for consumption but it is not. It is using incomplete beta software including Firefox and X and these are two central applications to the OS. Also KDE is unstable and I'm not sure if that's KDE's fault or Fedora. I'm glad to blame Fedora because they included it and touted it as a main feature of the release.

Also, why are nvidia drivers mandatory to get X working? Even windows 3.1 will work in VGA mode, and so will WinNT, Win2K, WinXP and I presume even the much despised of them all, Vista.

This OS is not ready for consumption by anyone who isn't technically inclined and patient. And by that, I say that while it is potentially great, it is an epic fail.

VGA mode people, use it! It's a standard for about 20 years now.

Obviously you were able to make Fedora display some sort of video output, since you are commenting on the stability of its KDE. So you were able to use VESA mode some how. "VGA mode" as you suggest would just leave you at 1024x768 with 16 colors, which would probably be a little disappointing for you.

Fedora never claims to be the most stable, easiest to use OS. It's claims to fame are firstly to be a completely free and open source OS (no NVidia binary blobs will ever be included) and secondly to be on the bleeding edge. That bleeding edge of open source is sometimes very painful. The NVidia drivers not working are not exactly Fedora's fault, if NVidia had opened at least their 2D specs the community would have excellent open source driver support for these cards. Yes it is a little irritating that proprietary video drivers from NVidia and ATI are currently unavailable, but that is not entirely Fedora's fault. The Fedora project has never officially supported these drivers and instead relies upon third party packagers such as livna.

Regarding the KDE environment's instability, it is widely known that KDE 4 is still in need of a lot of work. It is progressing quickly, but I think it is very telling that Fedora is the only major distro currently shipping it as their default KDE. Even OpenSUSE isn't ready to ship it as the exclusive KDE option in their upcoming OpenSUSE 11.

I'm a Gnome user personally and I find Fedora 9 to be one of the fastest, most up to date, and most complete Gnome distros available today. If you have any issues with it, report the bugs to the Fedora team, they are usually very timely with updates and bug fixes.